Animating the rotation, scale, skew, and position of SVG elements via CSS has been completely impractical due to major browser inconsistencies...until now. GreenSock's CSSPlugin handles major bugs and inconsistencies across a wide range of modern browsers, making it easy for you to animate SVG elements exactly like regular DOM elements... even in IE.

We're excited to announce several new features in the GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP) 1.12.0 that will increase not only "real" performance, but "perceived" performance as well. The innovative lagSmoothing() feature allows GSAP to automatically heal from CPU spikes that cause lag, all while maintaining perfect synchronization between all animations. And the new "lazy" rendering helps avoid layout thrashing when many animations start simultaneously.

I'm going to take a deeper look into CSS Animations and how they fit (or don't fit) into a modern animator's workflow. You'll see exactly where some of the pain points are for a typical project and how they can bring your workflow to a grinding halt.

With the release of iOS 7, I was anticipating some big leaps forward in browser performance. What I found was quite surprising. Is anyone else experiencing the same thing? Here's a quick [and very casual] video showing what I discovered:

Making a DOM element draggable isn't terribly difficult - there are jQuery plugins and even some native HTML5 capabilities in newer browsers. But generic dragging is kinda boring. What about smooth, natural momentum-based continuation after the user releases the mouse (or touch on mobile devices)? What about imposing bounds and edge resistance and silky-smooth redirection to certain landing values that you provide? Or flick/drag scrolling with bounce-back that doesn't look awkward? Or instead of dragging to change the position of an element, what if you want to spin it? Maybe you even want to track the momentum and let it come to rest naturally or rig it to glide to a stop at a certain value, Wheel-of-Fortune style? Yeah, that's a lot more complex. In fact, it can be a real drag to build (sorry, the pun was irresistible).

Learn the basics of GSAP JS fast. The Jump Start will walk you through a number of interactive slides that will show you exactly how GSAP JS works. Animating with JavaScript just got a whole lot easier.